I gave up on Melrose Place for a while. I posted my Season Three review on September 30, 2011. Yeah, last year. After completing that post, I got six or seven episodes into Season Four and just stopped watching. There are a few reasons why this happened. First, I began watching Law and Order (the original) more regularly. Second, I was preoccupied with submitting poems like a crazy person and helping plan our move. And third, the most important of my reasons for stopping watching Melrose Place, was Brooke.

I complained about Kristin Davis in my Season Three review. Her Brooke is manipulative and obnoxious and screws up everything. She is the reason for the two week hiatus I took while watching Season Three, and she is the reason I took this FOUR MONTH hiatus in the middle of Season Four. I can’t stand her.

I resumed watching Melrose Place because I finished watching all of the available Law & Order seasons on Netflix streaming (all eight. Where are the other ten+??? That’s for another entry). I watched Melrose Place only out of my Law & Order heartbreak and a sense of obligation to this website, as Melrose-related keywords bring me a lot of traffic for some reason. I powered through only hoping that something could happen. Brooke made everything worse and worse. It even got to the point where none of her fellow characters liked her anymore. I disliked Billy for being a Brooke-fan; once he became a Brooke-hater, I rooted for Billy again.

And guess what, the Melrose Gods stepped in and killed her. Brooke is dead. She fell and hit her head. Then she drowned. In the pool. I have wanted a pool death forever! I have been very very careful about avoiding spoilers in all past season reviews, but I don’t even care. I hate her! She’s gone. Since she died, I was able to power through the rest of Season Four easily, watching sometimes four or five episodes in a row without a shred of anxiety or angst.

Ignoring Brooke, Season Four isn’t a bad one. Dr. Peter Burns has grown on me. Dr. Mancini is always my favorite, and he had a lot of good moments with his never-changing trio of women: Jane, Sydney, and Kimberly. I also enjoyed some of Jake’s romances this season, and he’s a character I’ve been bored with for a while. Season Four brings a few celebrity cameos (my favorites being Priscilla Presley and Denise Richards) that I wasn’t expecting (perhaps because the show was more successful by this point?), and I hope that more celebrities show up in Season Five and beyond. So now that I’ve knocked this entry out, I’m starting Season Five immediately. My love for Melrose has been restored. I’m so excited!

I have finished watching Season Three. At this point I’m over 90 episodes in. That’s at least 67 hours (not including when they have special hour and a half long episodes). I could spend three straight days of no sleep or breaks and only watching Melrose—For some reason, maybe a pacing problem, it seems like it would take a lot longer than that.

I’m now so far into the show that my sense of timelines and plotlines are becoming blurred. I’m sitting here thinking, “was that Season Two? Or Three?” In part due to the blurriness and in part due to the precedent of avoiding plot spoilers that I set in previous entries, I hope to keep my comments general instead of specific. Though Season Three began with a very Billy/Allison-based cliffhanger, I was very disappointed in the direction that they took this season. Their breakup seems contrived and forced. When I complained to Derrick about it, he said, “It’s like they’re jumping the shark by NOT getting them married already.” I completely agree. I feel strung along by this obviously meant to be romance. I used to root for Billy and Allison. Now I just want them to get it over with. Get together, get married and get off the show.

Season One was saved when Heather Locklear joined the show, so I’m the first to admit that Melrose needs to be spiced up every now and then. I was seriously disappointed that they chose to bring in Brooke, played by Kristin Davis (who many of you now know from Sex in the City), to be the “new Amanda”. When she showed up, I seriously had to take a two week hiatus from watching. I couldn’t stomach how they let a brand new, completely random character, screw up the dynamic. I know that good fiction brings us trouble, but I want to like my bad guys, not hate them. She is spoiled, selfish, and manipulative.

You loyal readers (and Melrose fans) know that Dr. Mancini is always my favorite. This season, we got to watch him fall in love with the most appropriate of women, and even though this romance didn’t turn out the way that I hoped, it was nice to see him go from evil to good to evil again.

Season Three brings addiction, blackmail, Vegas, cults, framing, business (someone we know and love buys Shooters!), baby-stealing, failed romances, attempted murders, and lots of sex. And it ended with the biggest cliffhanger yet. I’m dying to see what happens (hint, AT LEAST one major character is going to be killed off), but I knew I needed to write this up before finding out who bites the dust.

I’ve finished Melrose Place’s Season Two, another 31 45-minute episodes. As I’m now 62 episodes into the show, I am completely invested in the characters, the show’s plot, and all this craziness of a 90’s soap opera. I didn’t want to reveal any important plot points for those of you who decide to watch the show or are watching the show, but I have to give you something, so I will spoil one plot thread that I had accidentally spoiled for me before I even started watching the show.

Like I wrote in my first entry, Marcia Cross & Doug Savant drew me in, and before I started watching Melrose Place, Derrick sent me a short YouTube clip featuring both of them. The two were walking down a hospital hallway arguing, and it didn’t really mean anything out of context, but it was fun to see these two wonderful actors working together in a much different world than the world of Desperate Housewives. So when Dr. Michael Mancini “killed” his fiancé Kimberly Shaw (Marcia Cross) early in Season Two in a drunk driving accident, I knew something wasn’t right. For one thing, there wasn’t your typical TV funeral. For another, I remembered this YouTube hospital conversation and knew that it hadn’t happened yet, so I watched the rest of Season Two anticipating Kimberly’s return. When she is finally resurrected, it is awesome, and it exceeded my expectations.

Though I had guessed that Amanda’s troublemaking would rule Season Two, I really have to give credit to Dr. Mancini. He is such a slimy, scummy, evil, egocentric, manly man that he took over the drama. The “murder” I revealed isn’t even the half of it. This man is lower than low. He even looks different than he did in the beginning of Season One. The show is really working with his new evil persona in it.

Season Two ups the melodrama in exactly the way it needed to be upped. There are murders, accidents, crimes, backstabbing, alliances, cheating, blackmail (probably the most popular device used in the show), repressed memories, and lots of conflicted romance. Nobody has died in the pool yet… but I did get a pool fight (complete with underwater cameras), which was awesome and definitely worth the wait.

We finished Desperate Housewives in late May, and we began to decide what TV show we’d be starting next. Melrose Place seemed like the natural choice. First, Melrose provided the career start for two of our favorite D.H. cast members: Marcia Cross and Doug Savant. Second, the early 90s soap feel seemed like a good predecessor to the drama of Wisteria Lane.

After watching the Desperate Housewives pilot, I immediately knew that this would be a show I couldn’t continue without Derrick. From the Twin Peaksy feel to the sight of Eva Longoria mowing the lawn in a ballgown, I knew that we’d have a good balance of suspense and humor to create a show that would be fun for both of us to watch. But I soon realized that Melrose Place wouldn’t be an activity that brought us together. Melrose Place is, apparently, just for me.

The first season is 31 episodes long, which is insane for a 45 minute long TV show. I lost Derrick after the first five, though he continues to receive updates about the show via my brief synopses. Melrose Place began as a show that didn’t know quite what it wanted to be. Was it a show with a philosophy of trying to be about nothing (::cough cough Seinfeld cough::)? That’s how it felt at first: a boring show about nothing, day to day activities of people who happened to live in the same apartment complex. I powered through only because I was waiting for something to happen, but believe me, I wanted to give up at moments too. Though the first ten to fifteen episodes of the show could have probably been compressed into five, eventually the show picked up the pace. When the characters were FINALLY developed, we began to have the makings of a story, a plot, some conflict. I root for characters like Billy and Allison to get together. I want to see Dr. Mancini’s marriage fall apart.

The show moved from a show without direction to something with the makings of a melodrama primarily with the help of one person, Heather Locklear. Her character, Amanda, will never be someone who I root for. BUT she causes trouble, and that’s exactly what this group of friends needed. As season one ends, Amanda has managed to sink her claws into every single person who lives in Melrose Place, and I imagine her battle to maintain control will be the primary fuel on the fire of Season Two. Though I think Amanda is bordering on psycho, she puts up enough of an air of properness to help build the façade that she is a tolerable human being. It’s fun waiting for her to reveal her true colors.

I will continue to update as I finish each season. Please refrain from providing spoilers in your comments. I will say this before I go… What I hope is that this melodrama becomes even more melodramatic. And my fingers are crossed that someone dies in the pool.